Betancourt Begins Venture After Departing Innovative

This story appears in the Dec. 7 print edition of Transport Topics.

Ernie Betancourt, until recently the president of Innovative Computing Corp., has parted ways with the country’s oldest provider of trucking software but not with the trucking industry.

Betancourt’s new venture — QuikQ LLC, a Franklin, Tenn., company — is designing what it hopes will be a replacement for the fuel cards that truck drivers commonly use to purchase diesel at retail outlets.

“I couldn’t leave trucking,” Betan-court said. He work-ed with Innovative for 12 years before he decided to sell to TMW Systems, of Beachwood, Ohio, and start his new business.

“It’s a little bit like watching a kid go off to college,” Betancourt said of Innovative’s Nov. 24 sale to TMW. “I would have liked to have accomplished more, but I think this was appropriate timing.”

The QuikQ system is intended to complement, but not replace, existing fuel purchasing services, Betancourt said. Only the physical cards themselves, and the information technology architecture used to process fuel transaction data, would be replaced.

The QuikQ product, called DFConnect, already is being field tested. The system combines truck, trailer and reefer-mounted radio-frequency devices with “a software engine that does all the details of the fuel transactions,” Betancourt said.

The software keeps track of the amount of fuel purchased, routes purchasing orders to a carrier’s office and creates a “virtual tank inventory” that would allow carriers to eliminate prescribed daily purchasing limits and instead limit fuel transactions based on the amount of fuel in a truck’s tank when it pulls up to the pump.

The combination eventually would allow drivers to fuel their rigs simply by pulling up to the pump. A wireless data exchange between truck- and pump-mounted devices would eliminate the need for drivers to swipe a card before pumping diesel — and eliminate the need for drivers to carry a card at all.

Because QuikQ’s device would be attached to equipment, rather than an operator, it could reduce mix-ups in a carrier’s accounting and fuel-tax reporting processes, Betancourt said.

For example, “We visited with a carrier that had a driver from the refrigerated division bring his truck in for repairs,” Betancourt told TT. “The shop sent him out with a tractor from the dry-van division, but he kept his fuel card.

“The owner turned to me and said, ‘That’s what I’m talking about: Now our accounting is messed up, our fuel-tax reporting is messed up, and our [miles-per-gallon] reports are messed up.’ ”

DFConnect’s software is QuikQ’s proprietary contribution to the system. Innovative originally developed software but sold the technology to Epona LLC, one of Betancourt’s holding companies, just before TMW bought ICC, according to an Innovative statement.

“I’m hoping this project will be done some time in March,” Betancourt said, “but software projects, you know, have a life of their own, sometimes.”